So, I've been living with an iPhone since it launched here in France, in late November 2007. That's more or less 1 1/2 years with Apple's little wonder. And, yes, I'm still sticking to the old original "2.5G" model.
So, what's my feeling after 18 month of iPhone? (pardon me for the length of this rather disorganised rant)
Well, first, I had been waiting for years for a phone that would do basic stuff correctly: sync my contacts and events on the Mac. I had a series of Samsung and SonyEricsson phones, and they all did Bluetooth sync, but there was always a catch: you could only sync 125 contacts (Samsung) or the fields in the address book could only hold 127 characters, meaning the sync would mess every contact that had longer fields in the Mac's Address Book. Etc. And the iPhone has this right: it just syncs and all is the same on my various Macs and on my iPhone (and, icing on the cake, I use MobileMe so it's all done wirelessly in the background... more on that later).
So, the iPhone scores on that point. It's a decent phone that does exactly what I wanted.
And then comes all the game changing stuff.
I don't even know where to begin... Maybe the easiest is the Safari/Mail couple, paired with the permanent Internet connection, but it's sort of obvious: you get your e-mail and you can browse anywhere, anytime. But, as they say, the devil is in the details, except here we're talking angels ;-)
The thing that really stresses out how important the permanent Internet connexion you get with your iPhone is, is when you do not have it anymore, for example when going abroad and not anywhere near a free wifi connexion. No emails, no web, no directions, no way to look up how far you are from the nearest metro station (you might even have to -gasp- ask someone...).
Example: I'm cycling with my son in the countryside and we don't know whether that small track branching off to the right will bring us back to where we started... I simply fire up Maps in Satellite mode and, yes, I can see the dirt track on the picture and decide it’s the right way to go.
Example: We’re talking music with some friends and can’t remember who wrote the original opening song for The Wire. I simply launch Safari, load Wikipedia and I have the answer (Tom Waits, btw).
Example: I’m early for an appointment with my physician, like 5 minutes-early. I watch a couple of Apple’s 2’-long Aperture tutorial videos (there are about 40 of them and they’re perfect to watch two at a time).
And then there are the AppStore apps...
The ones I use daily or almost daily or that I find amazing are:
-NetNewsWire: this is perfect for RSS reading, it syncs with my NewsGator account so stuff I read on the go is marked as read on my Mac back at home, and when I find a lengthy piece I’d rather read back home on a large screen, I just clip it.
-OmniFocus: perfect to-do solution, it syncs also with my Mac at home and has a nifty “location” feature that sorts your available tasks according to distance to your current location (like “fix garden sprinklers” will be on top of the list if I’m close to home).
-EverNote: great for taking on the fly notes, especially with the really nice “photo notes” tool, that uploads your picture to their servers and does OCR on it, allowing you to look by text for that shot of that poster where the dates for that Chemical Brothers gig were.
- Skype: yeah, skype, this is AMAZING... When travelling abroad (like, say, Bali), all I need is some wifi access and I can use my Skype out credits to phone home for almost nothing, and it’s really cool to not have to sit in front of your computer to do that (btw, audio quality is often better than regular cell call).
- Guitar Toolkit: amazing all-in-one guitar tool, let you tune your instrument, consult a database of chords or use it as a metronome. It even has a “lefty” setting.
- Shazam: if you ever wondered what that catchy tune playing off the PR system in a bar was, then Shazam is pure magic. Fire it, grab an audio sample and it will identify it. I mean, that’s like science-fiction...
- Google Earth: yeah, I know, there’s Maps, but GE has one thing for it: caching. I was in Cotonou (Benin, Western Africa) recently, and city maps there are completely useless. Of course, no way to use Maps since I always turn “data roaming” off. But all I had to do was look at the area I was interested in using the hotel’s wifi, zoom to the desired level and get offline... When in doubt on the streets, I simply fired up GE and could look at high resolution aerial pictures of the surroundings, cached on the iPhone. Really cool to try and get your bearings in an unknown African city.
-NetShare: I was one of the people fast enough to grab NetShare before it was pulled off the AppStore, so I can tether my iPhone to my MacBook Pro through wifi and use it as a wireless modem, quite handy for emailing a couple attachements or uploading some pictures to flickr when there is no Internet connexion at hand.
Of course, there are some drawbacks... I never suffered battery problems on my 1st gen iPhone, but it’s true that my wife’s 3G iPhone has a shorter life between charges. Sometimes I wish I could listen to streaming radio while browsing the web, so yes, background apps would be nice (but see battery problems). Copy paste would be great too, but that is coming soon in iPhone OS 3.0. Some apps tend to crash a lot, but I guess that’s a fair share between the OS and the apps themselves.
And this is the one thing that a lot of people overlook: when you buy an iPhone, you buy an evolving product: what wasn’t in iPhone OS 1.0 got in 2.0 and 3.0 will bring its load of novelties. When was the last time you bought a phone that got software upgrades? Yeah, same with me. Lucky if you get a couple bug fixes in a year. The iPhone I have in my pocket is the same piece of hardware that I bought 18 month ago, but it’s a completely different device actually. And it will change again in a couple month with the 3.0 update. And I won’t have to wait for Orange to move their corporate ass and decide they will offer the update, but maybe first to UK customers, France will be a month later. No, updates come from Apple, and they come to every phone.
What Apple did with iPhone is simply put back wireless carriers where they belonged: providing the “pipes” and leaving our phones alone.
Oh yes, they also brought us a device that is the first real “sci-fi gadget” come true.
So, kudos for that to Apple, and long live the iPhone.
